Ok, first things first, you should have a program for editing pictures and stuff such as (preferrably) Photoshop . Also, you'll need a gif editor. I recommend Microsoft GIF Animator as it's free and doesn't require Web TV or anything else. You can download it for free from here.

Ok, now that you've got your programs downloaded and installed, it's time for the fun to begin!

(*note* I'm going to presume you're using both Photoshop and Microsoft GIF Animator, or MGA for short.)

Let's use two examples.

The first example is how to edit currently existing gifs. Now let's say you've got a gif with several frames of animation. Go into MGA and click on Open, find the gif file that you'd like to edit and open it. You'll see every frame of animation, and by clicking on each individual frame you can click on Options, Animation, and Image to edit such aspects as Duration, Looping, etc. If you're viewing an already-created gif, you'll notice how every frame has its own settings. For example, if you open up a gif of Ryu throwing a Hadoken some frames will have longer duration than others.

Now if your intention is to add/delete/splice frames of animation then it's all very elementary. Let's say you've got four frames of animation and you want to remove a frame. Simply click on that frame and then click the Cut icon on the top. Viola, it's gone. Now, let's say you want to add a frame or add an entirely different gif. Very easy. First, determine where you'd like to insert it within the currently opened gif. How you do this is easy: simply click on the frame in which you'd like it to appear above and then go to the top, click on Insert, find the gif and add it in. Furthermore, you can duplicate frames and move them around, but you should find this all very easy to do.

Keep one key thing in mind -- the order of the animation begins on the top frame and progresses downward.

Now, set your Duration for each frame, Looping (Repeat Forever opens once you click on Looping, so you definitely want that), Transparency (or none), etc. Before you decide to save your newly created gif, you'll want to click on Preview over in the top-right corner to view how the finished gif will look (*note* You can do this at anytime).

Please keep note of the size and positioning of each frame, especially if you're adding/splicing in frames of animation from a seperate gif. The reason for this is obvious; you don't want a jerky animated sequence. Also, please keep note of both the maximum size in KB and the actual size of the gif. The reason is because forums only allow a certain amount of KB and have a space restriction (for example, MagicBox Forums only allows about 41KB and 150x150 max size). Of course, if you're just creating gifs for your own website or for whatever other reason then you can disregard my former comments about limitations.

Example two involves editing gifs and picture files such as JPGs in order to utilize them in the creation of your own gif. Let's say you want to create a gif from scratch, or, you simply want to add in a jpg image (or other type of image file). As you'll notice, you cannot add in anything but gif files to MGA. Why? Because it only accepts files that are in true gif format. What this means is that you cannot simply take any picture and rename it .gif in order to open it in MGA because, chances are, it simply will not work.

What to do....

Open up Photoshop and open the jpg or whatever file you'd like to have put into your gif. (*note* If you try and open up a gif in Photoshop it will only display the first frame of animation. More on this topic later.) Before you do anything else, click Image, Mode, and then click on RGB color. You won't notice that it has done anything but it has, trust me. Make sure the picture is of proper size in proportion to whatever else you'll be animating (though it doesn't have to be....). Let's say you've got a picture that's too big and you only want a portion of it, or you want to shrink it without it looking terrible. There are two key areas necessary for inspection at this point: Image Size and/or Cropping. If you've got a very detailed picture (say 760x840 at 72 resolution) and you resize it by going to Image, then Image Size, you'll probably make it look too distorted/grainy. And maybe you've already cropped the section of the image you'd like to incorporate into your gif, but it doesn't resize to satisfaction.

In the event of either of the former scenarios, what you should do now is click File, then New. It will prompt you to choose the image size (let's say you're creating 150x150), Resolution (72 is the standard, so be sure to put that in), and Mode (choose RGB Color). Click Ok. Now place your mouse cursor on the borders of your new currently blank image and expand it both horizontally and vertically (this is most easily done you expanding via any choice corner). Go back over to your other image and, since we've selected 150x150 image size in this example, you'll want to make certain that the image you want looks square/even, not too rectangular because then when we Scale the image it will look flattened.

Now then, if the picture you're editing is in fact bigger (or smaller) than the new picture file opened and you want to resize the entire image, click on Move Tool, click and hold on the image you want resized and, while continuing to hold down the mouse key, scroll the arrow from the actual image to the new blank image. You'll see that it overexceeds the boundaries of the new image. Not to worry: Click Edit, Transform, then Scale. You'll notice that there's now an outline over your new image (if you can't see it for some reason, expand the borders even further, or simply hold down the mouse key within the Scaled image to move it around). Using your mouse icon over the borders, hold down the mouse key and move the borders of the traced Scale outline so that all four borders fit perfectly even on the open image file. You'll know they're perfectly even because the outline of the Scale will overlap the border of the new image file flawlessly. Once your image is in place, you'll probably notice that it looks relatively blurred. Do not worry about this. Simply click on the tools over on the left and it will prompt you to Apply the transformation. Click Apply and it should look very clean and crisp. However, if you were resizing an image that was smaller than your new file, it may look a bit more pixellated overall. That's the sacrifice you take.

Once your picture is satisfactory, click File, Save As (not just Save), make sure the file name is what you want, click on the Format toolbar and select .GIF (CompuServe .GIF), then save it into whichever file you'd like and the image is ready to be utilized in MGA.

Now, what about editing the frames of a gif in Photoshop? You know that you cannot view every frame simply by opening it in Photoshop, so here's what you do. Open MGA and the gif you'd like to edit images from, Cut every frame except for the frame you want to edit, then click on Save As, set the name and etc., and save it (it doesn't matter if it's still a gif because it's just that one frame anyway that you'll be editing). Just make sure that you don't save over the actual gif your editing frames from because then your gif will be ruined and you'll have to download or create it again. Repeat the above process if your intention is to edit various frames of animation. This is because you can only open one frame at a time in Photoshop.

Follow the procedures laid out before and edit each frame to your satisfaction. Always make sure that every frame is in RGB color and is saved as a gif. Once you've edited every frame, go back into MGA and add each frame in one at a time. You can even pull from other gif images you may've saved--that's the beauty of this program. Make sure that everything is in the proper order, the Duration of each frame, etc, etc. Once your gif is complete, click Save As, name it whatever you want and presto! Your self-created gif is complete!

I hope I was of service to you. If you have any other questions, I'll address them.

Sure. No prob. If you have any further questions, fire away. Oh, and I should also bring this little point up: If you save a picture and it's in jpeg format you can simply rename it jpg and it should be just fine.

that gif animator is awesome, herers my first gif, had to draw about 35 pictures and the gif itself is like 65 frames, this isnt even the ful gif though, I was originally planning on making it my avatar but uh...its way to big of a file, heck I even had to butcher it just to attach it to this thread, its about 140kb I think so yeah

what I edited out it that the ball slowly shrinks back to nothing and then he puts his arm back down, so that it would seem seamless in the loop, but yeah...like I said, butchered it for size..

special thanks to Icarus4578 for telling me about this awesome program